Self-censorship Among Student Journalists in the Age of Trump
(Photo/Illustration/Joaquin Kunkel)
By Anya Schiffrin
A climate of self-censorship has chilled University campuses across the U.S. and it’s not just among faculty. Student journalists are another group experiencing the problem.
A key moment was the March 2025 arrest of Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Oztürk, who had co-authored an op-ed criticizing the University administration’s response to student Senate resolutions on Gaza. Soon after, the Student Press Law Center issued an alert in April 2025 telling students that “ethical journalism demands that we minimize harm” and that “student media may fail that obligation if they continue to adhere to traditional guidelines in light of recent developments. ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms.”
At Columbia University, student journalists were at the forefront of campus coverage throughout the last year, garnering prizes for their reporting. But student journalists are now afraid to use bylines on their stories and in spring 2025, editors at SIPA’s own student publication, The Morningside Post, agonized over how to publish articles without putting international students at risk.
These kinds of painful conversations are part of a broader trend of self-censorship among student journalists. On October 8, Columbia Journalism School PhD candidate Adelina Yankova came to SIPA to discuss her dissertation on student journalism under the Trump administration. Across campus, support for journalism was clear. The journalism school hosted the Reporters Without Borders photo exhibition and the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes for investigative reporting from and about Latin America. Jelani Cobb, dean of the Journalism School, joined with other speakers to denounce the Trump administration’s attack on free expression.
Students said it was refreshing and meaningful to have open conversations about self censorship and free speech on campus.
Over pizza at IAB, Yankova said that student journalists at many colleges are grappling with the same dilemmas. She’s observed several overarching trends in the last few months: increased use of anonymous sources, difficulty getting sources to speak– particularly University administration officials– and student journalists’ fear of being identified and retribution over something they wrote.
“There is much more awareness of the digital footprint now,” Yankova said.
Indeed, it was a takedown request from a former SIPA student who was nervous about an article he wrote criticizing Trump, that prompted my invitation to Yankova. Some 30 students attended the event.
Traditionally, journalism organizations would be unlikely to remove an accurate piece from their public archives. But these are not normal times. “Student journalists are adapting, sometimes by reviewing their anonymity and takedown policies, allowing for flexibility on a case-by-case basis, and making sure to educate sources about the potential consequences of having their names in the paper,” Yankova noted.
Journalism professors said that they had also begun to remove archived stories if they pose a risk to the student writer, but it took a lot of discussion before they were able to change their policies. “We are all former journalists who believe we should stand by our stories and that it’s important to have an archive of our work– but we are an educational institution not a publisher…what students create as students should be a learning activity and not one that can mark them for life,” said Dr. Alex Wake, professor at RMIT and president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia.
“Archives pose their own set of questions and risks,” said Istvan Rev, director of the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest, which is one of the largest Cold War and human rights archives in the world. In a recent paper, Rev wrote “one popular notion holds that archives are neutral storehouses of fact. But archives have always been active, interpretive spaces: shaped by power, vulnerable to error, and at times complicit in distortion.” He points out that amassing vast amounts of information can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences and, in an email, he further noted that European Union data protection laws which protect individual right to privacy do not apply in the U.S. Knowing that past articles may later be used to punish the students who wrote them, student journalism archivists might be more wary about what they preserve online.
In an interview, Joel Simon, the former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the current director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism in New York City, says that the Center has been engaged in multiple discussions on the rights of journalists and that some these discussions are relevant for student journalists too.
On October 6, the center hosted a discussion about the First Amendment rights of non-citizen journalists. The Trump administration's recent deportation of Mario Guevarra, a journalist living and working in Georgia for nearly 20 years, challenged the long-established legal precedent of First Amendment protections for non-U.S. citizens. “An area of settled law is potentially becoming unsettled and we have to fight hard to preserve it,” Simon said, as lawyers in attendance predicted that this battle will reach the Supreme Court.
Simon noted that non-U.S. journalists, including student journalists, are now avoiding covering controversial topics, such as the funeral of Charlie Kirk and protests about Gaza. “This is having real consequences for information flows,” Simon said.
“You can imagine if there is so much fear in newsrooms it is even more widespread among students…. in the current climate we can’t offer categorical assurances that your first amendment rights will be protected,” Simon said.
While prominent news outlets and late night television networks have recently accommodated the Trump administration’s attacks on the press and free speech, journalism organizations have stepped up and spoken out, bringing to bear decades of experience working around the world. Joel Simon began his career researching and advocating for press freedom in Latin America and clearly identified the current threats.
“The administration is trying to chill speech and stifle dissent. That’s why it’s so important to take a clear eyed view of what they are actually doing and what they are capable of and to make a clear-eyed assessment, based on individual risk tolerance, about how to respond.”
Anya Schiffrin is the co-director of the Technology Policy & Innovation concentration at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She is faculty advisor to The Morningside Post.